30 Dec Staying Safe Today
For those of us raising children, it’s not super common to send them a few blocks away to play without first making sure they’ve got a buddy to walk with. If they’re not going to be with a friend, we often walk them ourselves. We don’t let them ride a bike or ski without wearing a helmet, and we get nervous when they’re little and play out in the front yard alone. Right?
If you’re a woman, you might think twice before running at night without carrying mace, and even in daylight, a secluded nature trail may seem like a sketchy gamble. As adults, we take note of the scary sides of town, the places you don’t want to be after dark, the things that are better to steer clear of. We lock the doors at night and check the windows, and we’re careful to not leave our mobile devices unattended. And here’s the thing: it isn’t as though more scary things happen today than historically, but it seems like we find ourselves thinking more often about what could go wrong. Think, for a minute, about how the aforementioned practices we live by would have been foreign to our great-grandparents.
We navigate with passwords all the time: bank passwords, email passwords, passwords for your accounts on favorite retailers’ websites and Amazon, and the list goes on. Our great-grandparents didn’t live in a world of the Internet, cell phones, and tablets. But we do, and in order to keep it all straight and make sure we don’t get mixed up in some identity or financial theft (or heaven knows what else!), we use passwords like crazy.
How about all the regulations for the food you buy from the store? Back in the day, people grew their produce, harvested it, rinsed it (or not), and sold it. When you’d buy food at a joint on the side of the road, there were no stipulations for food handling and being able to run a restaurant. It just wasn’t done. In today’s world, however, we read food labels (we want the nitty gritty), we follow the “sell by” and “use by” dates like they’re our religion, and if we walk into a restaurant that doesn’t seem clean, we turn around and walk out the door again.
Our great-grandparents didn’t go to the airport and get padded down at security, and their children didn’t walk through school doors equipped with metal detectors, either. 9/11 forever changed the world — of airport security, certainly, but the ripple effects extended much further than that. And mass shootings in public places (among other terror attacks) have made us much more vigilant when it comes to safety.
And hey…would your great-grandmother ever have thought to put her kid in a swim diaper and plastic pants when they were going for an outing at the pool? And how about the push to lather on sunscreen in ample amounts to keep the kiddo safe from the sun’s UV rays? (We’d wager not, not least of which because they likely hit the local stream or pond to cool off when it was hot, and not a public swimming pool.) It was just a different world, and what is common for us today wouldn’t have been the norm for them.
And, since we’re in the transportation industry, it’d be an oversight to fail to mention seat belts. Years ago, kids rode in the front seat, back seat, bucket seat, or back-of-the-pickup seat like it was no big deal and without a seat belt. Nobody even blinked or thought twice about it. Today, though? Get caught doing that, and you’ll be ticketed and fined. We buckle up for everything, and even buses are now being made with models that have seat belts.
And when you ride in a motorcoach, it might be important for you to know about our safety record, another thing that folks may not even have thought about 100 years ago. In keeping with the trends of our time, we make it a point to prioritize our passengers’ safety. We work hard to maintain the highest standards—in the maintenance of our fleet vehicles to ensure that they are in top condition, as well as being careful in our hiring process so that no one is behind the wheel who shouldn’t be. When you ride with us, we want you to feel 100% confident that you’re in good hands! Learn more about what we are doing to keep you safe here: https://astrotravel.com/destinations/were-safe/